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HomeChristopher continued his work at the British Museum, and Jacquetta began thinking about a new book. Christopher’s Foundations of Prehistoric Britain was well received on its publication in April, 1940, and Jacquetta, largely on the strength of the Jersey book, her excavations, and papers, was elected to join her husband as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Their collaborative writing project, Prehistoric Britain, also continued, although they asked the publisher, Allen Lane, for postponement of publication; given the war conditions this extended deadline was hardly an unusual request. The book eventually appeared as a wartime paperback.
This was an uncertain time for London. On Primrose Hill, the trees were felled, and a gun enplacement was erected. Jacquetta and Christopher moved out of their home in Fitzroy Rd, and into a small flat just around the corner, at 35D Regent's Park Road. Young Nicolas was their prime concern, but should he go to his grandparents in Cambridge, or elsewhere out of the city? The solution came out of a chance aquaintanceship, but one which led to one of the most traumatic events of Jacquetta’s life. On the recent Dorset holiday, near Chideock, Jacquetta and Christopher had made friends with the Pinney family, who had an old manor-house in nearby Bettiscombe Manor, near Beaminster. The Pinneys would be happy to welcome Jacquetta and Nicolas to the countryside nearby as temporary evacuees. This quiet resolution of a domestic problem was, in fact, papering over sizeable cracks. At this time, Jacquetta was in emotional turmoil, nursing a self-absorption and deep unhappiness that if not actually brought on by the uncertainties of war, was certainly not helped by it.
Diana Collins wrote of her friend at this time: ‘There was a wildness inside Jacquetta, occasional desires to break the rules, something that belied her calm and formal exterior, something the restrained and conventionally educated Christopher could never reach. Now there was also a growing and unresolved tension between her rational scientific self and an imaginative and creative gift that was beginning more and more to seek an outlet. She may have appeared a highbrow intellectual, but, at heart, she was entirely romantic.’
In her fraught state, Jacquetta left Christopher hard at work, as ever, and took Nicolas across London to Paddington station, and thence to the south-west of England. At Paddington they joined the vast throng leaving the city to an anticipated security in the country and the coast. As always, Jacquetta was atuned to the moment: once again it provided an image for her archaeology, and it appears in her prelude to Prehistoric Britain: ‘I find it hard to believe that this body of mine took part in the great exodus from Paddington, that it had a place in the trains crowded with migrating families…’.
Once in lodgings in Dorset, away from Christopher and her domestic role and somewhere, moreover, where there was the gift of security, Jacquetta's suppressed emotional longings burst out. She found herself overwhelmed by a violent passion for Betty Pinney. “It meant a sudden undamming of feelings of an intensity that I did not know I possessed, “ she wrote later. She knew there could be no expectations but, as many did during the war years, she lived for the moment “even if the direction they took could not lead to fulfilment they brought me delights and occasional ecstacies as well as pains and bewilderments. I shall never lose the beauties of the Dorset countryside while my love was at its height”.
For someone as individual as Jacquetta, it was an unsual union. She wavered between utterly subsuming herself, and trying to get away from her passion, “In spite of my obsessive devotion, my adolescent longing to be able to rescue my lady from some dragon or other, I also had a curious apartness, being always conscious of the absurdity of the situation”.
Betty Pinney, according to Diana Collins, was “a strange, rather cruel character. She alternately encouraged and then repulsed Jacquetta.” This was a romantic, even courtly, love for Jacquetta; on the only occasion that Betty attempted to lure her into bed Jacquetta at once retreated. At one point she leapt out of a window in flight, although it is unclear whether this was a means of taking her life – which seems extreme, even for Jacquetta at this time – or to literally extricate herself from Betty, which seems more likely. It was an appalling situation. She had to take herself and Nicolas away from this delusive place of apparent safety. She, Nicolas and his Irish Nannie, Mrs O’Toole, left for Cambridge. At Grange Road, she reckoned at least there would be no such high emotional dramas. However, those were to come in London.
If the affair with Betty Pinney had shaken Jacquetta, she still had to maintain a decorum about it, and the family continued to holiday with the Pinneys. She spent one weekend with Stuart Piggott and his wife, and then went on to have had several days with Betty Pinney in Dorset. Nicolas also just recalls a joint holiday with Pinneys in Cornwall.
Meanwhile, to say that Christopher was leading a life different from his wife is something of an understatement. His concerns were somewhat graver; he was seconded to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Jacquetta, possibly still recoiling from the shock of the Pinney episode, was determined to live with him in London during the Blitz 'for the only time in my life to experience and resist extreme physical fear'. Jacquetta also needed to work for the cause, and so she became an adminstrative civil servant with the War Cabinet, a job which she recalled “brought me immense interest, amusement and some understanding of the higher bureaucracy”. She was also unwittingly laying down the foundations for a more significant role in Britain, as assistant principal in the Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction..and also for what would be a life-changing meeting for UNESCO.
A black notebook she kept at the time of her Civil Service work shows that she was attending small meetings with key people as early as November, 1940, though not yet officially employed. She was interviewed, successfully, for the job of Private Secretary to Sir George Chrystal, who was briefly Secretary of the Cabinet Committee on War Aims and Reconstruction. This became the Post-War Reconstruction Secretariat, attached to the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, and was later headed by a poet, Tom (Sir Quintin) Hill. Jacquetta started the job on the 13th of January, 1941.
Amidst the bombs falling on London, and the strangeness under which Britain maintained itself with the enemy a whisper away, Jacquetta flowered in the Civil Service. Meanwhile, Christopher rose to the post of Secretary to the Air Supply Board; and he continued to write. He joined his family at Cambridge, where Nicolas flourished with his grandparents and Nannie O’Toole. After the peace of weekends in Cambridge, Jacquetta would return to London, picking her way through broken glass and the debris of bombed houses as she found her way back to Primrose Hill. On the 17th of April, 1941, in a letter to her parents, she wrote a graphic and vivid account of the Blitz.
In 1943, she moved to the Ministry of Education, where she rapidly progressed to becoming a principal. This gave Jacquetta a fascinating and relatively new medium in which to practice her visual and storytelling talents. Jacquetta, who was principal and editor-in-chief, had the final decision. If she approved a project, the money would be forthcoming. The Crown Film Commission asked her to make an educational feature about archaeology suitable to be shown in parts to schools, and in full to the general public.
The result was the 1946 release, The Beginning of History, which is notable for a number of reasons. Jacquetta wrote about the making of it Antiquity. It is filmed in black and white and its photography is quite stylised, using a variety of ways of communicating the past, some of them prescient. There is a nod to ethno-archaeology of many years later with tools shown being made by modern hands, and of weapons being cast; the stone, bronze, and Iron Age artifacts were shown under beautiful lighting, giving them the appearance of art objects. The use of specially filmed sequences added dimension to what could otherwise have been predominantly static 45 minutes; a young Nicolas Hawkes is given a cameo role, whittling sticks, and looking at animals in London Zoo, closed to Primrose Hill. Even the ‘graphics’ - maps showing the various incursions into Britain throughout prehistory were a new way of illuminating Britain’s occupying forces, an irony not lost on its wartime film-makers. An Iron Age round-house was specially reconstructed at Pinewood Studios, and although lacking a human cast - real animals were used, however, some escaping and never rounded up - it was a effective a set as any built for a Powell and Pressburger wartime feature.
Most startling of all was the permission gained by Jacquetta to take her crew to film in Orkney. The Admiralty thought this educational filming mad, but was persuaded to give its permission. The important Neolithic site of Skara Brae being the prime motivation for their visit, while in the seas around them submariners toiled for signs of the enemy in Scapa Flow. The film was lyrically scripted by Jacquetta, and voiced by the distinguished poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who became a loyal friend. Jacquetta’s involvement with the film unit also brought her another long-lasting and close friendship, with Helen de Moulpied, who was director of the film department of the Ministry of Information. Helen was already making films, and she and Jacquetta worked well together. Helen played a key role in Jacquetta’s life during the founding of UNESCO, and not least as her coinfidante during the start of her affair with Priestley.
Jacquetta became as an `established' principal of the civil service; this was a potentially a career for life. And of course, she resisted it, possibly because she went home in the evening to a form of establishment of a domestic kind. Christopher still wrote late into the night, and while both continued their passionate engagement with archaeology, passion of another sort eluded them as a couple. Jacquetta began increasingly to look around for a social life, one of her own making. Reflecting on the situation years later, Jacquetta recognised that Betty and her other passions for women, were in fact a compensation of sorts for unfulfilment at home “…the springs of my emotions having been released, I was almost ripe for heterosexual love”, she declared. And she was anxious to prove it. She had casual affairs: “they were as sexually meaningless as my marriage”, she wrote in A Quest of Love. “I remember that I first became an adulteress to the sound of Mozart” she added (providing a line which was apparently picked up as an American magazine’s quote of the year.) She soon came across a project which would satisfy her in every way.
Early Britain was one of the series of slim, popular, hard-back books called “Britain in Pictures” which were produced during the war under the General Editorship of the Australian poet and music critic, Walter J. Turner.
Jacquetta met Turner sometime in 1942. Her name was becoming well known in London literary circles, she was stepping out with writers and artists, and she was broadening her remit as a writer. She had started reviewing for The Spectator, which published a piece by her on June 26th, 1942, on Planning Matters: and a further one on Community Centres, others followed, on archaeology and poetry- subjects closer to her heart - and in 1943, it published her review of a book about the Mass Obervation Project. In its edition of Nov 26th 1943, the magazine featured Jacquetta’s first published poem, called 'Sentiment in Autumn'.
Peggy Lamert, Jacquetta’s close friend from Newnham, who had long forgiven Jacquetta for their final-year estrangement, invited her friend to an intimate drinks party at her flat in Kensington. She was now working as a reader for the publisher Chatto and Windus, and her circle was of mutual fascination. Among the guests that evening was Walter J.Turner, a distinguished man in his 60s, accommpanied by his wife, Delphine. Peggy, full of bravado and desperate to help Jacquetta realise her passion, had set up the meeting, instinctively realising the potential of this match. Peggy remembered the immediate effect that Turner and Jacquetta had upon one another, describing the atmosphere as 'electric'. Turner was almost twice the age of Jacquetta. But it seemed not to matter, nor indeed did it seem to matter whether Delphine was aware of this sparking romance. Theirs was an unconventional marriage; although Turner never left his wife, and appeared to be genuinely attached to her, he had many affairs.
In Turner, a poet who no less than Yeats selected for his anthology of modern verse, Jacquetta unhesitatingly saw a 'genius', and a man of impulsion. It was, she felt, the antithesis of Christopher’s brilliance. Not least, Turner, although an eloquent and elegant poet on the page, had a refreshing Australian brusqueness. He had a contempt for class affectations and the imposed mores of English polite society; the Hawkes family values, particularly those of Mrs Eleanor Hawkes, within which Jacquetta had strained to live, were exactly those put-down by Turner at every opportunity. His poetry was wrought from real and deep emotion. At 23, he had come to London to join his mother after the deaths, in quick succession, of his brother, his father, and his grandparents; he was on a spiritual quest, and so was Jacquetta. In this passion and wildness, much of it a response to his own strict religious upbringing, Turner had met his match.
Further, as Turner’s biographer, Wayne McKenna, has pointed out, the poet’s great driving force was his passion for great art, which became a form of religion to him. He elevated great musicians, among them Beethoven, to a form of deity and he was a demanding critic who often fell foul of fellow writers. Not that this troubled him, and he littered pages with the fall out from his sparring matches; he was literary editor of The Spectator - another publication in common with Jacquetta.. For more than 20 years he was music critic of the New Statesman, in which he locked horns with its new director, one J.B.Priestley. Jack later recalled the context: ‘Now I was foolish enough to write something about a series that W.J.Turner (that fine poet) was editing. At once the enraged Walter Turner slammed in a letter telling the world that for years I had been notorious for my conceit, arrogance, refusal to take any criticism – a V2 of a letter’. Turner’s reposte was typically cutting: ‘Abominable I agree, and of course we wouldn’t have published it if you hadn’t been a director’.
Jacquetta, now an establishment figure by virtue of her work, was perhaps taking a risk in being associated with such a wayward personality. Undoubtedly brilliant, he had a number of enemies who simply did not understand him. Kingsley Martin eventually sacked him from the New Statesman. However his strong views also won many local readers and friends. And although joining those who dismissed J.B.Priestley as a ‘low brow’ writer, Turner greatly admired his play Johnson Over Jordan, and said as much.
But Turner’s passion came with a price. He was a man of considerable needs himself; could he give Jacquetta what she desired? And his love life was undeniably complex. Would there be room for someone as expansive as Jacquetta?
After the initial spark at Peggy Lamert’s, Walter and Jacquetta worked at engaging their minds, finding a mutual interest in a range of topics from J.W.Dunne’s time theories, to the sciences, the arts and not least, anthropology and archaeology. When they, soon after, became lovers they met intellectually and physically; it was the meeting of minds for which Jacquetta had longed.
She later described their relationship as `sharply divided between purely intellectual friendship and a shameless eroticism. We did not meet very often, but I became wholly infatuated.' Jacquetta recalls an occasion when, unexpectedly meeting Walter at an exhibition, she promptly fainted.
She reached, it seems, the ecstasies of Mount Carmel in her relationship with Walter: it 'produced a strange purity of its own, and brought me visions akin to those of godhead. I poured out verse, much of it bad, but containing some poetry and a few really good lines.’
How Christopher responded to this change in Jacquetta, or indeed if he noticed it, is not recorded., the letters they exchanged with each other were most often practical, but still warm.
The relationship with Walter Turner suited Jacquetta; she knew that there could be no life with him, but their infrequent meetings were enough to satisfy her longings, and to help her articulate her own growing poetic ambitions.
Not least, there was the matter of her professional relationship with W.J.Turner, her General Editor for Early Britain. The jacket of the book, published in 1945, shows a striking contemporary design of Uffington White Horse in cream on green, rising over Hawkes' name. And the text begins with a memory, once more, of those Mount Carmel excavations. This time they centred on visit to the site from 'a raw-skinned sandy-haired officer of the Black Watch' who was shown the skeleton of a woman, which had just been excavated. Jacquetta described this:
'The skeleton sprawled there rather pathetically on the terrace outside the cave, lying among the bones of gazelle and other game which the Palaeolithic hunters had killed. He broke the silence only at tea in camp when he suddenly exclaimed, "She must have been up there before Eve then?" I have not forgotten the expression in his eyes as they stared through pale lashes at some terrifying horizon.'
Jacquetta shows an empathy here with the non-archaeologist coming to terms with the revelation of age. The account is both sensory and sensitive; one written as Jacquetta was rediscovering her own sensuality with Turner. She shows themes which would be worked through constantly, change over time, and a mindfulness of the rate of change: "It is not surprising that a sudden revelation of this kind overtaking an individual during an afternoon's walk should bring terror. I often think it more remarkable that our species as a whole has taken the news of its biological evolution as calmly as it has'.
Jacquetta also draws attention to the 'spiritual effect' of scientific knowledge: 'the disenchantments presided over by Copernicus and Darwin, are not often analysed, but must be very great'. The slim book, which was marketed as much to the lay reader as the amateur archaeologist, attempts to make sense of 'continuous rapid development', but never strays from Hawkes's theme of the immense debt owed to the so-called 'brutish' early hominids: 'Never has originality been more fundamental that that shown in the battered pebbles that were their tools'.
The book mirrors the arguments laid out by Jacquetta in the film The Beginning of History. Its bibliography includes the classics of the day: Gordon Childe's Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1940), her husband's newly published Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, Collingwood's Roman Britain (1934) and Cyril Fox's The Personality of Britain (1943).
Illustrations were central and well-chosen, including Praetorius's water-colour of 'The Desborough Mirror', a prime example of La Tene art; a Celtic coin from Jersey, and several archaeological landscapes, among them the contemporary John Piper's intense landscape, 'Hambledon Hill, Dorset'; James Bridges' mid 19th century study of Stonehenge, a work from Alexander Keiller's estate; an oil painting by Richard Tonge of Bath 'painter and modeller of Megaliths' of a tomb at Petre Ifan in Pembrokeshire, courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries, and an oil painting from 1814, depicting 'Finds from a Round Barrow at Winterslow, Wiltshire' being a Bell beaker, two flint arrow-heads and a bracer to protect the wrist from the bow-string, by a Mr.Guest of Salisbury; striking Modern in appearance, its objects are set floating against the landscape.
The artifacts to illustrate the text include a scattering of gold finds - a Grunty Fen gold torque, which would have been familiar from her childhood museum visits in Cambridge, a bronze crescent from Llyn Cerrig in Anglesea, and a torque from the Broighter gold hoard from County Derry - with black and white illustrations or Anglo Saxon urns, North Leigh Roman villa, again by Bridges, and E.Kirkall's 'Akeman Street and the Road to Bicester' after Stukeley. Not least there are renditions of sites of uncommon view: I.Logan's 1827 water colour of three stone rings - Old Keig, Balquhain and Balgorkar, impressive for their pre-aerial photography perspective.
The range selected illustrates Jacquetta’s keen and confident visual sense, no doubt aided by her dialogues with Turner, and the importance she placed on aesthetics as a way of conveying the breadth of archaeological possibility. If the text is partial to a gallop through history - and in just 47 pages there was little else to do - Jacquetta swooped on the emotive and summoned up vivid mental images: she talks of the towns where Roman culture and habits would 'subdue unruly Celtic passions' and those offering Britons 'their only escape from the slough of barbarism'; later we read that the decaying Roman rule meant that 'in what had been fine houses families camped in squalor, lighting their fires on the tessellated pavements: barbarians in the decline of a civilisation'. Jacquetta seizes on this to find hope rising in the loss of imperial civilisation, despite this 'final, irreversible catastrophe, the end of all values'. 'How many of the English place-names that are so close a part of their countryside perpetuate the name of an adventurer of those times who, having seized his piece of land, cut the trees and built his own farmstead, settled down to beget his contribution to the Anglo-Saxon nation?' (Years later, after the Turner and Priestley affairs and their denouements, Christopher Hawkes, expert on Roman archaeology, married an Anglo-Saxonist)
Jacquetta concludes the book with a poem, ‘A Devon Signpost’.
'Feniton and Tallaton, Honiton and Whimple- Still the endless stream of tongues, Mothers', daughters', fathers', sons' Chafe and smooth the syllables As a river rounds its pebbles...'
Indeed, Jacquetta’s poetry blossomed under Turner’s affections and attention. She quickly transformed the many fragments of ideas she had gained from her archaeology and produced a profusion of work, of varying shades, some more successful than others.
Turner, also was writing poetry inspired by Jacquetta. These were to be included in his next volume to be entitled, Fossils of a Future Time?
While distracted by her poetry, and not least the frisson of meetings with Turner, Jacquetta contrived to maintain the domestic order. She and Christopher moved back into 39 Fitzroy Road in May, 1944. Nicolas joined then the next year. In August, they went on a family holiday near Machynlleth, mid-Wales, Nicolas by then grown into a demonstrative child, nurtured by his grandparents and, in particular, his ever kind and gentle granny Hopkins.
Domestically, Jacquetta began to create again. Nicolas remembers the interior of Fitzroy Road as being filled with pictures; Jacquetta had begun to collect even at the couple’s first home, and her keen eye had helped her acquire a number of interesting works. The return to Fitzroy Road gave the small family their garden again; it was a small plot with a tree and rising to a wall at the back, but it gave Jacquetta much joy. She begins A Land with a reverie in which she describes lying in the garden, relishing the feel of the ground beneath her.
As the war progressed, and optimism for Britain increased, Jacquetta and Christopher could think again about their own plans for the future. Jacquetta was working full-time as a civil servant, while having reviews and poems published regularly in the Spectator. Jacquetta was keen for her husband to advance his career, but Christopher was less ambitious. He gave a major paper on ‘The future of discovery: archaeology at home’ at the Institute of Archaeology, then housed in nearby Regent’s Park. And even as they held down full-time lobs, they also worked on their collaboration.
It was an important book, both for its authors, and for the archaeology community acting within the confines of the war effort. Christopher had already distinguished himself with The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, published in 1940. Prehistoric Britain was the couple’s first – and only – joint publication. Their mutual love of archaeology had long been overshadowed; Christopher was obsessed with his work, Jacquetta with her new social circle and the emotional demands of the affair. .In the spring of 1945, Nicolas and Nannie O’Toole had returned back to London. Soon afterwards the first V2 landed on Primrose Hill, shattering most of the windows in the district.
Examining closely the text of Prehistoric Britain, one can see the traces left by two utterly different people, ostensibly taking their readers along the same path through prehistory, but with different motivations.
Jacquetta’s name appears first on the publication, only proper as she wrote most of the text. She writes the foreword and within it reveals a division of labour which also illuminates the underlying tension.
She begins with a stylistic flourish in which she gathers her narrative tools, and swiftly defends the personal nature of her writing: '...the material with which the prehistorian works is far more intimate than the documents of the historian. It is true that he lacks the romantic appeal of famous names, he cannot marshal an array of kings, heroes and law-givers, but instead he handles the actual things which helped men to pass their lives: the pots from which they ate and drank, the weapons with which they hunted or killed one another, their houses, their hearthstones and their graves. He is concerned with the lives and achievements of countless ordinary, anonymous people'.
Of the 'procession of events' charted by archaeology, Jacquetta feels the need to employ another personal, visual device: 'for myself I see them as it were threaded on a taut line which stretches from the present near my eyes and back and back into the distance of the past - a line which is in fact the historical time-sequence, the long line of the passing years...we have in this book held to it like a guide'.
And then: 'A word as to the manner of our collaboration. I have written chapters I-IV, the greater part of Chapter V, Chapter VII and the Topographical index. My husband wrote certain parts of the Vth and the whole of the VIth chapter. More than that, his exacting scholar's eye scanned my text and allowed nothing dubious or inaccurate to pass. For this the reader will be more grateful than I was. J.J.H.'.
A note about the table of dates becomes both a point of information and a justification for the prehistoric imagination: 'The reader will understand that the earlier these are, the less precise their accuracy becomes.'
The prelude, written by Jacquetta, is an early example of the subjective style with which archaeological academia became increasingly uncomfortable. Her early frankness is illuminating; one senses that its writer was compelled to explain something to someone far closer than her readership.
'I began upon the first edition of this book in 1940 when, if one listened to the intellect alone, a German victory seemed almost certain. I was in fact preparing to write about the deepest roots of a civilisation whose top most shoots were perhaps soon to be hacked off. ...As this book will show, prehistorians have spent their learning and ingenuity on reconstructing continental invasions of Britain that took place thousands of years ago. In 1940 we expected to be eye-witness of another, and its victims.
'It was amusing to see in how many ways the present promised to reflect the past; it was even reassuring – the feeling 'this has happened before' gave perspective to one's own fate. In the early summer of the year I was living in East Anglia where it was known that we were threatened by invasion from the Low Countries, North Germany and Scandinavia, just the regions from which the prehistoric invaders of our eastern coasts had usually come. What happened next? One by one I watched my acquaintances, openly or surreptitiously according to t heir natures, join in a westward migration, some to south-western England, many more to Wales. Irresistibly caught up, my small son and I found ourselves in Dorset, a unit of mass movement to the west. How reminiscent it was of an earlier Germanic onslaught when the warlike and pagan Anglo-Saxons swept down on eastern Britain, and the Celts, pacific after the centuries of Roman rule, fled before them to seek safety among the western hills.
'As the summer of 1940 advanced, German hordes were reported to be massing down the coast of France, and the whole of southern England became uneasy. This again followed the prehistoric pattern, for throughout the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, our southern shores had been invaded from France. In our particular western corner of Dorset we talked of the alarming nearness of Normandy and Brittany, of boats rumoured to be gathering at Cherbourg and Brest. I reminded myself how Dorset had known invasion from Brittany in Neolithic times, at the beginning of the Bronze Age and again in the Iron Age.
Finally there was Italy, the latest enemy. Letters from friends fled to Cornwall suggested that the Italians were threatening the safety of the south-western peninsula, while there were frequent rumours of Italian landings in Ireland. Here again prehistory could show analogues, for archaeology has proved that those areas were always accessible to movements springing from the Mediterranean, for instance that which brought the Megalithic chieftains four thousands years ago...
'But now it all grows distant and unreal, quite as far from recall as the events of prehistory; I find it hard to believe that this body of mine took part in the great exodus from Paddington, this it had a place in the trains crowded with migrating families - those things might have happened at any time. Faint and impersonal though this memory now is, this opening digression has been allowed in order to give some idea of the natural routes by which settlers and conquerors have at all times approached the British Isles; Chapter One will immediately follow with some account of the nature of the country itself.' Thus this lyricism stops at pragmatism.
As with the lyricism of the sea and the land which begins the otherwise formal volume of the Prehistory of the Channel Islands, the prelude to Prehistoric Britain showed the foundations of A Land, Jacquetta’s ability to take her reader on a journey – this time out from the chaotic scenes at a London station, and out to the hoped-for safety of the countryside. Her introduction of the utterly personal words ‘this body of mine’ echoes the beginning of A Land, and that same body lying in her garden as she and London recovered from the war.
As ever, her descriptions are detailed and rich: 'In prehistoric times no considerable progress was made in clearing the dense covering of oakwood and thorny undergrowth supported by the heavier and richer soils. This luxuriant growth, and the damp soil beneath, made great tracts of the lowlands...impossible for human settlement and all but impenetrable.' Jacquetta always positions the human in the landscape, and who better a figure than herself, a device she uses again A Land.
Christopher's contribution is utterly assured and straightforward. Of Caesar's attempts to land in Britain he writes in crisp narrative form:'...in August 55 BC he made a start by crossing from Boulogne with some 10,000 men, to explore, and if all went well, to force obedience at least on the Belgae of eastern Kent. But all did not go well: his fleet was damaged by a stormy high tide on the beach near Deal, and the local tribes with their chariots and horsemen gave his army some very sharp encounters'. Christopher shares a feeling for description - the furnishings of chieftain's hearths he says included 'were superb iron firedogs rising at either end to the likeness of a knob-horned ox-head, which display a the artist's feeling for fitness of design in wrought metal. While the White Horse of Uffington, the form which graced his wife’s ongoing collaboration with Turner, is 'probably a gigantic rendering of the same new form of strange, half-supernatural creature cut in the chalk of the Berkshire Downs by a people who boasted him as a tribal or religious emblem'. He talks of form and metal but misses the human input of his wife’s style; his delicacy is offset by pragmatism and science, as on La Tene 'the unfaltering curves and circles of such designs set off by hatching with the look of basketry - though it was more probably inspired by the stitchery of gay textiles which themselves, of course, have perished.'
The military precision with which Hawkes planned his excavations is reflected in his writing, which while stolid, lacked his wife's lyricism and form. 'Septimus Severus, a soldier and a hard realist', we learn from Christopher Hawkes, 'must have seen it was no good attempting any longer to annex Scotland: it was simply not worth while. What he had to attempt now was to guarantee security to Hadrian's frontier, so that the Roman investment in Britain behind it should be worth while'.
The last word of this coupled book is Jacquetta's, as she continues to convince the reader that the archaeology of Britain is as much of the now, as prehistory. 'Chapter after chapter, almost page after page, has shown a recurring theme: the invasion of that island from the continent'. She eschews the Romantics - 'many of us must have stumbled upon one of those gloomy, dripping and uncomfortable grottoes dear to the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century gardener...' and calls on the sprit of Leland, Camden, Stukeley and Lysons to chart archaeology's own prehistory. A Neanderthal skull from Gibraltar she discusses must have brought to mind that Neanderthal skeleton she exposed at Mount Carmel, which promoted such poetry and prose. One of archaeology’s great characters and pioneers, General Lane-Fix Pitt-Rivers is described in colourful terms and brought alive to the reader: 'When excavating he would drive off to the site in a high dogcart, accompanied by carefully trained assistants, perched on penny-farthing bicycles, and displaying the General's colours around the brims of their boater hats.'
She is not shy of using the words 'inspiration', 'growing self-consciousness' ;. and praises Pitt-Rivers’: 'His work can still be used today, often to support ideas of which he could have no conception”.
And then she presents some idea of archaeological techniques for the lay-person. She lauds the new techniques of 'air photographs' and outlines the cast of 'curious-looking people' at a typical dig: 'Individuals covering the widest possible range in age, in beauty, and in dress, are to be seen using theodolites, plane-tables, compasses, tape-measures, masons' trowels, tooth-brushes, often with exceptional seriousness and concentration. Sometimes, even, a dig may rather resemble a medieval Last Judgement: at the visitor's approach human figures suddenly raise themselves in holes in the ground.'
With more dry observation, Jacquetta lays bare the site in other ways: 'The effect of propinquity on human relationships can hardly be over-estimated, and few excavations of any size or duration are without some love interest.indeed there is no doubt that love has saved archaeology a considerable sum in wage bills'. Knowledge of local soil conditions is useful, she observes: 'Sometimes an elderly man will emerge to act as tea-maker and general batman; he may also try to rear beans or vegetable marrows on the spoil heaps'.
'It may be an impediment if a woman is utterly unwilling to risk scratching her nails, but it is far more serious if a young men show signs of ceasing to shave, for slovenliness may appear also in their work.
'A certain scholar who wore numerous and bulky clothes and was continuously too optimistic about his own memory had always to be searched in the evening of a day’s digging, for crucial finds lay in all his pockets and there was still some chance, in the evening, that he may remember where they came from' . This wit leads back to a serious question: 'Finally, dare we ask what it is all for?’ The answer she provides is earthy and raw: 'Archaeology traces from its very beginning the very process which now obliges man to go smelling out his own tracks in this way...' .
The demands of the war had been exacting; the authors' plea to their publisher, Allen Lane, worked and they won more time. The book appeared in February 1944, by Penguin, as a Pelican Book, and was well received. It was republished in 1947, as a hardback. A further, revised, edition appeared in1958; by then archaeology had moved on. And so, not least, had its authors.
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